Apple has announced an event dubbed 'One More Thing', which is scheduled for Tuesday, 10th November at 10am PST (6pm in the UK). 'One More Thing' is a catchphrase that was often used for big announcements inserted at the end of a keynote in the Steve Jobs era. Invites included the catchphrase, date and time, and stated that the event would be live streamed from Apple Park.
A newly released AR teaser shows an Apple logo 'opening and closing' as if it is on an invisible MacBook lid. Bloomberg sources confirm that Tuesday's event will be a platform to launch a range of Apple Silicon or Arm powered Macs.
The Apple event next Tuesday will be the firm's third this autumn. Previous shows covered important Apple products like the iPad Apple Watch, and iPhones, so for hardware the only major thing left to update is the Mac line - and Apple's computers are selling pretty well this year.
It was back in June this year that Apple dropped a bombshell by announcing a two year Mac CPU transition from x86 to Arm (so called Apple Silicon). At the time an A12Z Bionic SoC system was shown off and released to developers. As the devices launch for consumers there will be the significantly more powerful 5nm A14 Bionic SoC in play. This processor packs in 11.8 billion transistors and features a new 6-core design for a 40 percent boost in CPU performance, and a new 4-core graphics architecture for a 30 percent improvement in graphics compared to the previous gen SoC. Additionally it features a 16-core Neural Engine and second-generation machine learning accelerators. The A14 design is rumoured to be modified slightly with distinct versions for iDevices, laptops and desktops.
Bloomberg's story says that Apple and its manufacturing partners are ramping up production of three Mac laptops with Apple processors; new 13-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, and a new 13-inch MacBook Air. It says that Quanta is making the larger laptop with Foxconn tasked with making the two 13-inch portables. Bloomberg's insiders say that the 13-inch laptop are further ahead in production and people will at least see these next week. Apple isn't using this opportunity to change much else, with no other significant design changes flagged by sources.
Apple Macs account for fewer than 10 per cent of personal computers sold. Intel x86 CPUs have featured in Apple Macs since 2006 giving it a big performance boost as PowerPC technology started to lose its shine. Interestingly Apple isn't just going to be making low power, thin and light designs using Apple Silicon, it is expected that iMacs will be the next to cross the architectural line, followed by an all new compact (half sized) Mac Pro computer.
